MV Wilhelm Gustloff
(Wilhelm Gustloff in 1939)
MV Wilhelm Gustloff was a German
military transport ship which was sunk on 30 January 1945 by Soviet submarine
S-13 in the Baltic Sea while evacuating German civilians, German officials,
refugees from Prussia, Lithuania, Latvia, Poland, Estonia and Croatia and
military personnel from Gotenhafen (Gdynia) as the Red Army advanced. By one
estimate, 9,400 people died, which makes it the largest loss of life in a
single ship sinking in history.
Constructed as a cruise ship for
the Nazi Kraft durch Freude (Strength Through Joy) organisation in 1937, she
had been requisitioned by the Kriegsmarine (German navy) in 1939. She served as
a hospital ship in 1939 and 1940. She was then assigned as a floating barracks
for naval personnel in Gdynia (Gotenhafen) before being put into service to
transport evacuees in 1945.
Operation Hannibal – Evacuation:
Operation Hannibal was the naval
evacuation of German troops and civilians as the Red Army advanced. The Wilhelm
Gustloff's final voyage was to evacuate German refugees, military personnel,
and technicians from Courland, East Prussia, and Danzig-West Prussia. Many had
worked at advanced weapon bases in the Baltic from Gdynia/Gotenhafen to Kiel. The
ship's complement and passenger lists cited 6,050 people on board, but these
did not include many civilians who boarded the ship without being recorded in
the official embarkation records. Heinz Schön, a German archivist and Gustloff
survivor who extensively researched the sinking during the 1980s and 1990s,
concluded that Wilhelm Gustloff was carrying a crew of 173 (naval armed forces
auxiliaries), 918 officers, NCOs, and men of the 2 Unterseeboot-Lehrdivision,
373 female naval auxiliary helpers, 162 wounded soldiers, and 8,956 civilians,
of which an estimated 5,000 were children, for a total of 10,582 passengers and
crew. The passengers, besides civilians, included Gestapo personnel, members of
the Organisation Todt, and Nazi officials with their families. The ship was
overcrowded, and due to the temperature and humidity inside, many passengers
defied orders not to remove their life jackets.
The ship left Danzig (Gdańsk) at 12:30 pm on 30 January 1945,
accompanied by the passenger liner Hansa, also filled with civilians and
military personnel, and two torpedo boats. Hansa and one torpedo boat developed
mechanical problems and could not continue, leaving Wilhelm Gustloff with one
torpedo boat escort, Löwe. The ship had four captains (Wilhelm Gustloff's
captain, two merchant marine captains, and the captain of the U-Boat complement
housed on the vessel) on board, and they disagreed on the best course of action
to guard against submarine attacks. Against the advice of the military
commander, Lieutenant Commander Wilhelm Zahn (a submariner who argued for a
course in shallow waters close to shore and without lights), the Wilhelm
Gustloff's captain Friedrich Petersen decided to head for deep water which was
known to have been cleared of mines. When he was informed by a mysterious radio
message of an oncoming German minesweeper convoy, he decided to activate his
ship's red and green navigation lights so as to avoid a collision in the dark,
making Wilhelm Gustloff easy to spot in the night. As Wilhelm Gustloff had been fitted with
anti-aircraft guns, and the Germans, in obedience to the rules of war, did not
mark her as a hospital ship, no notification of her operating in a hospital
capacity had been given and, as she was transporting military personnel, she
did not have any protection as a hospital ship under international accords.
Sinking:
(Path of the ship)
The ship was soon sighted by the
Soviet submarine S-13, under the command of Captain Alexander Marinesko. The
submarine sensor on board the escorting torpedo boat had frozen, rendering it
inoperable, as had Wilhelm Gustloff's anti-aircraft guns, leaving the vessels
defenseless. Marinesko followed the ships to their starboard (seaward) side for
two hours before making a daring move to surface his submarine and steer it
around Wilhelm Gustloff's stern, to attack it from the port side closer to shore,
from whence the attack would be less expected. At around 9 pm (CET), Marinesko
ordered his crew to launch four torpedoes at Wilhelm Gustloff's port side,
about 30 km (16 nmi; 19 mi) offshore, between Großendorf and Leba. The first
was nicknamed "for the Motherland," the second "for
Leningrad," the third "for the Soviet people", and the fourth,
which got jammed in the torpedo tubes and had to be dismantled, "for
Stalin." The three torpedoes which were fired successfully all struck
Wilhelm Gustloff on her port side. The
first torpedo struck Wilhelm Gustloff's bow, causing the watertight doors to
seal off the area which contained quarters where off-duty crew members were
sleeping. The second torpedo hit the accommodations for the women's naval
auxiliary, located in the ship's drained swimming pool, dislodging the pool
tiles at high velocity, which caused heavy casualties; only three of the 373
quartered there survived. The third torpedo was a direct hit on the engine room
located amidships, disabling all power and communications. Reportedly, only nine lifeboats were able to
be lowered; the rest had frozen in their davits and had to be broken free.
About 20 minutes after the torpedoes' impact, Wilhelm Gustloff listed
dramatically to port, so that the lifeboats lowered on the high starboard side
crashed into the ship's tilting side, destroying many lifeboats and spilling
their occupants across the ship's side. The
water temperature in the Baltic Sea at that time of year is usually around 4 °C
(39 °F); however, this was a particularly cold night, with an air temperature
of −18 to −10 °C (0 to 14 °F) and ice floes covering the surface. Many deaths
were caused either directly by the torpedoes or by drowning in the onrushing
water. Others were crushed in the initial stampede caused by panicked
passengers on the stairs and decks. Many others jumped into the icy Baltic. The
majority of those who perished succumbed to exposure in the freezing water. Less than 40 minutes after being struck,
Wilhelm Gustloff was lying on her side. She sank bow-first 10 minutes later, in
44 m (144 ft) of water. German forces
were able to rescue 996 of the survivors from the attack: the torpedo boat T36
rescued 564 people; the torpedo boat Löwe, 472; the minesweeper M387, 98; the
minesweeper M375, 43; the minesweeper M341, 37; the steamer Göttingen, 28; the
torpedo recovery boat (Torpedofangboot) TF19, 7; the freighter Gotenland, two;
and the patrol boat (Vorpostenboot) V1703, one baby.[18] All four captains on Wilhelm Gustloff survived
her sinking, but an official naval inquiry was only started against Wilhelm
Zahn. His degree of responsibility was never resolved, however, because of Nazi
Germany's collapse in 1945.
Losses:
The figures from Heinz Schön's
research make the loss in the sinking to be 9,343 total, including about 5,000
children. Schön's more recent research is backed up by estimates made by a
different method. An Unsolved History episode that aired in March 2003, on the
Discovery Channel, undertook a computer analysis of her sinking. Using maritime
EXODUS software, it was estimated 9,600 people died out of more than 10,600 on
board. This analysis considered the passenger density based on witness reports
and a simulation of escape routes and survivability with the timeline of the
sinking.
Aftermath:
Many ships carrying civilians
were sunk during the war by both the Allies and Axis Powers. However, based on
the latest estimates of passenger numbers and those known to be saved, Wilhelm
Gustloff remains by far the largest loss of life resulting from the sinking of
one vessel in maritime history. Günter Grass said in an interview published by
The New York Times in April 2003, "One of the many reasons I wrote
Crabwalk was to take the subject away from the extreme Right... They said the
tragedy of Wilhelm Gustloff was a war crime. It wasn't. It was terrible, but it
was a result of war, a terrible result of war." About 1,000 German naval
officers and men were aboard during, and died in, the sinking of Wilhelm
Gustloff. The women on board the ship at the time of the sinking were
inaccurately described by Soviet propaganda as "SS personnel from the
German concentration camps". There were, however, 373 female naval
auxiliaries amongst the passengers. On
the night of 9–10 February, just 11 days after the sinking, S-13 sank another
German ship, General von Steuben, killing about 4,500 people. Before sinking Wilhelm Gustloff, Alexander
Marinesko was facing a court martial due to his problems with alcohol and for
being caught in a brothel while he and his crew were off duty, so Marinesko was
thus deemed "not suitable to be a hero" for his actions. Therefore,
instead of gaining the title "Hero of the Soviet Union," he was
awarded the lesser Order of the Red Banner of Military Valour. Although widely
recognized as a brilliant commander, he was downgraded in rank to lieutenant
and dishonorably discharged from the navy in October 1945. In 1960, he was reinstated as captain third
class and granted a full pension. In 1963, Marinesko was given the traditional
ceremony due to a captain upon his successful return from a mission. He died three weeks later from cancer.
Marinesko was posthumously named a Hero of the Soviet Union by Mikhail
Gorbachev in 1990.
Wreckage:
Noted as "Obstacle No.
73" on Polish navigation charts,[30] and classified as a war grave,
Wilhelm Gustloff rests at 55°04′22″N 17°25′17″E, about 19 nmi (35 km; 22 mi)
offshore, east of Łeba and west of Władysławowo (the former Leba and Großendorf
respectively). It is one of the largest shipwrecks on the Baltic Sea floor and
has been attracting much interest from treasure hunters searching for the lost
Amber Room. In order to protect the property on board the war grave-wreck of
Wilhelm Gustloff and to protect the environment, the Polish Maritime Office in
Gdynia has forbidden diving within a 500 m (1,600 ft) radius of the wreck. In 2006, a bell recovered from the wreck and
subsequently used as a decoration in a Polish seafood restaurant was lent to
the privately funded "Forced Paths" exhibition in Berlin.
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